The film follows a college-age protagonist struggling to escape from a masked slasher hell-bent on killing her again and again while she tries to solve the mystery of how she got stuck in a time loop. (It’s also quite funny.) Reliving the same day over and over is an unimaginably potent form of psychological torture, and adding murder to the equation does little to dull that edge. Most of the entries on this list are covered in enough feel-good spin to land as comedies, but Happy Death Day stares the horror of the time-loop phenomenon right in the face.
Pick away at the surface of a time-loop movie and you find a horror movie. Galaxy Quest is available to rent on Amazon.
Tacking on time travel as a deus ex machina for the actors in a Star Trek–like show pressed into service as an actual space crew by an endangered alien race is the exact right amount of ribbing in a movie that’s as on point as it is hilarious.
But its use of time travel is meaningful insofar as the movie itself is a loving spoof of Star Trek, which makes use of time travel in three films ( one of which made this list), not to mention dozens of episodes across its various TV iterations. So let’s get to it.ĭoes Galaxy Quest really count as a time-travel movie? Some compelling reasons argue that it doesn’t: Time travel isn’t a major factor in the plot, and the time traveling that does occur is, yes, only a 13-second jump. (It also leaves off perhaps the Ur-time-travel movie, Primer, and the quite good Midnight in Paris because their directors don’t deserve the column inches.) We’re looking at self-contained stories using time mechanics from the start, with preference given to those that involve themselves more intently with the ins and outs of time travel that ask questions about time, aging, memory and so forth and that try to succeed at it in new and interesting ways. That being said, the list leaves out movies in larger, more extended franchises in which time meddling is a one-off dalliance thrown into a sequel with little by way of foreshadowing: think Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Avengers: Endgame, and Men in Black III. What these films all do have in common is a fascination with changing the way time works. There are movies about trips through time but also ones about the bending and fracturing and muddying thereof then there are those about, as Andy Samberg aptly puts it in Palm Springs, “one of those infinite time-loop situations you might have heard about.” There’s even a movie in which we get only 13 seconds’ worth of time travel, when it functions more like a joke whose punch line hits at the film’s climax. Some films on this list barely qualify as time-travel movies at all others could hardly qualify as anything else. In any case, the time-travel stories deemed worthy of Hollywood budgets aren’t always straightforward in their mechanics. (Of course, you could argue that this is because the present-day concept of bidirectional time travel would infinitely multiply or change beyond recognition any future that may occur, but that’s a knot for another article.) Back to the Future Part II aside, it seems as if there’s something about going forward in time that just doesn’t track for humans. So absent is the future from the canon, in fact, that when it is involved, typically future dwellers are leaving their own time to come back to the present. It’s compelling to watch a character in a movie do what we cannot - right past wrongs or uncover the reason for or meaning behind the events in their lives, whether they be emotionally catastrophic or merely geopolitically motivated. As Mark Duplass’s forlorn character says in Safety Not Guaranteed, “The mission has to do with regret.” With all the potential to explore the unknown world of the future, so often when our minds conspire to bend the rules of time it’s instead to rehash the old. It must say something, surely, about humans, how often time-travel movies are about returning to the past rather than jumping to the future.
Photo-Illustration: Vulture Photos Courtesy of the Studios